How to Customize Back End By Using Extension's Events

Algolia is a powerful tool that opens the door to a variety of search features. Some of these features are for specific use cases and it would not be practical to implement them all directly in the extension. For this reason, the extension offers a series of hooks that you can use to take advantage of many extra things that Algolia offers.

In this guide you’ll learn how to attach hooks to the events fired by the Algolia extension. It should only take a few minutes. Let’s get started!

The following tutorial assumes that you already have created a CustomAlgolia module.

Create the Observer and hook methods

For our first example, let’s say you want to change the settings the extension sends to Algolia every time the configuration changes. The name of this event is algolia_index_settings_prepare.

To hook into this event, first we need to create a file called Observer.php in the app/code/local/Algolia/CustomAlgolia/Model/ directory. Then we need to add this content:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
class Algolia_CustomAlgolia_Model_Observer
{
  public function updateSettings($observer)
  {
    $settings = $observer->getIndexSettings();

    /*
    Here you can update/add/remove different Algolia settings

    See what settings you can use here:
    https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-client/methods/settings/#the-scope-of-settings-and-parameters
    */
  }
}

This method, updateSettings, will be called every time the event is triggered.

There’s just one more thing we need to do. Add this snippet to the config.xml we were working with before, inside the <config> node:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
<global>
    <events>
        <algolia_index_settings_prepare>
            <observers>
                <algolia_customalgolia>
                    <class>algolia_customAlgolia_model_observer</class>
                    <method>updateSettings</method>
                </algolia_customalgolia>
            </observers>
        </algolia_index_settings_prepare>
    </events>
</global>

These lines tell Magento which method should be called on which event.

In the same way, we can attach more hooks to different events. The complete list the events that are triggered by the extension is here.

In the end, your config.xml file should look like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<config>
    <modules>
        <Algolia_CustomAlgolia>
            <version>0.1.0</version>
        </Algolia_CustomAlgolia>
    </modules>
    <global>
        <events>
            <algolia_index_settings_prepare>
                <observers>
                    <algolia_customalgolia>
                        <class>algolia_customAlgolia_model_observer</class>
                        <method>updateSettings</method>
                    </algolia_customalgolia>
                </observers>
            </algolia_index_settings_prepare>
        </events>
    </global>
</config>

You’ve now written your own module and added more power and flexibility to your Algolia Magento integration. High five!